WATERFRONT WEDNESDAYS PRESENTS: John Ashbery's Description of a Masque

John Ashbery’s zany modern fairy tale of life. How does it come to us? Through a mash-up of classical mythology and nursery rhyme characters with a touch of noir film banter thrown in: a masque where anything might happen, just like in life itself. 

The performance was preceded by an exhilarating drum circle led by Kuumba Dance & Drum / Operation Unite.

Performed by Shanekia McIntosh, Craig Reardon, and Zoe Tuck (“radio play” arrangement of text by Jeffrey Lependorf).

Shanekia McIntosh is a poet and performer. Her interdisciplinary work, inspired by the black diaspora, aims to disrupt and confront historical colonial erasure. Utilizing the thematic palettes of dislocation, trauma, migration, climate crisis and afro-futurism.  Her work has been featured in the New Museum, Second Ward Foundation, Charim Galerie, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, Hudson Hall, NY Live Arts, ICA at VCU, Basilica Hudson and more, with recent work published in Chronogram, Apogee Journal and The TENTH Magazine. More at ShanekiaMcIntosh.com.

Craig Reardon is a poet and the Librarian & Archivist for The Flow Chart Foundation. He received his MLIS from the State University of New York at Albany, where he is also completing an MA in English Literature with a concentration on modernist poetry. A phi beta kappa scholar, he has presented public poetry lectures and presentations. He also tutors in Latin and Ancient Greek, and leads poetry reading groups. 

Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches through the Threshold Academy and hosts “The But Also Reading Series with Britt Billmeyer-Finn. She co-curates Belladonna* Collaborative's Close Distances Reading Series and co-edits Hot Pink Magazine. Zoe is the author of Soft Investigations (Daisy Mayhem Books 2019) and Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light 2014). An excerpt of her epic poem, The Book of Bella, is forthcoming in 2022 from DoubleCross Press. Find out more at zoetuck.com.

This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature and administered in Columbia County by the Greene County Council on the Art (dba CREATE Council for the Arts)